It does. Shadowflame works like this:

1. Who is dealing the damage? It only checks damage dealt by the holder (this includes their pets and other things like items that are sourced back to the originating champion).

2. What type of damage is being dealt? It only proceeds if it's magic or true damage.

3. What percent health is the enemy at? If they are below the threshold, it crits, dealing the increased damage.

It has some other hidden rules, like not applying to summoner spells, but Liandry's damage would fall within these, since it deals magic damage and is being dealt by the Shadowflame holder.

All of that having been said, I would say Liandry's Shadowflame Yorick is a...bold choice.

Cryptbloom was designed as a Void Staff alternative. This led down a pretty linear path:

1. We don't want an item that does more damage than Void Staff, so it probably should have less pen and/or less AP.
2. We can give it other stats if we want to fill out the stat profile. Haste makes sense here since by the time I was working on Cryptbloom I knew that there was going to be slightly less haste in the rest of the system (no mythic passives, nerfed haste boots, no 30 haste items, etc.) and we were willing to accept AP champions getting some of that haste back with a damage tradeoff. But HP was also something I considered, though I never actually tested that version.
3. In keeping with #1, we want an effect that doesn't provide any damage, because we don't want this to compete with Void in terms of raw damage output. It also probably shouldn't be pure stats since that's what Void is, so it wants some kind of unique effect. Given the above reasoning, it should be some type of utility effect....

MazrimReddit

I did it Reddit, soraka e tick rate up. This is huge for cancelling pyke hooks and stopping people flashing out of it (esp after hrglass)

https://www.reddit.com/r/leagueoflegends/comments/1am1s74/riotendstep_tether_changes_incoming_targeting_144/kpjsb4j/

Thanks /u/endstep, I have been asking about this bug on and off for like 5 years

np

gaenakyrivi

if you’re gonna buff aatrox cause of tethers, where are the karma and leblanc compensation buffs. they’re clearly the ones who will get impacted the most, not aatrox.

This is completely unrelated to tethers, and is attached to another bugfix in this patch.

LeagueofSpreadsheets

Aatrox's tether didn't change, the rioter who made the change actually used the method that was already in the code for Aatrox's tether to fix all the other tethers.

I used the same underlying piece of tech but not the same code. Aatrox's W uses a specialized setup to account for the abnormal shape (and also attaching the tether to a point rather than a unit), whereas every other tether is effectively a circle attached to a champion, so I wrote a new script for the other tethers that's a lot simpler since it can assume a lot of things (e.g. it's always two units being attached and the area is a circle).

ExplodingFistz

You seriously need to make more videos like this! I am in game dev and hearing your tech talk is music to my ears.

Thanks very much!

MazrimReddit

Related in tick rates, can you make soraka e properly silence people, they can flash out of it especially after hourglass because the tick rate is so slow. It also doesn't cancel pyke hooks on low ping

I can take a look at Soraka E but no promises, as I believe the issue with that is a very different one than the tethers (to my knowledge, both are tickrate related but in a quite different way).

Foucz

Will this fix soraka E letting people flash after zhonya ends ?

This is unrelated to Soraka E, as Soraka E is not a tether. This change only addresses tethers.

x_TDeck_x

Honestly very cool. I expect Leblanc to be hit the most but I still kind of expect it to be relatively minor.

One that I'm very curious about if it even applies in this context is Varus R spread. I feel like quite often the spread doesn't break even when you're pretty significantly out of the spread circle

I believe Varus R uses a different system but I'll take a look at it later today and see if it could be improved

NapalmGiraffe

Hey Endstep! Thanks for the video. Quick question- is there a chance that champs who used Armor and MR shards (Galio, Malphite, etc) are being looked at for slight compensation buffs on their passives for the lack of damage from those runes? I noticed in my recent Galio games going into Akali and not being able to double MR shard was very noticeable in both my survivability (w reduction scales off MR too) and passive damage for trading.

It's possible, I recall when we were working on them there was discussion around things like this. I'm not up to date on whether there's still followup happening or not though, that would be on the Live pod which is more Phreak's area.

acloudfullofrain

TLDW; In short, on live servers, tethers sometimes fail to break immediately when flashed out of due to server frame checking. Now, with the implementation of area checking, they break instantly, which slightly nerfs champions like Karma, LeBlanc, Nocturne, and Morgana. Compensation buffs may be considered for affected champions.

good summary, thanks

FrankTheBoxMonster

Bit of a messy patch data wise but I think I got most of Rek'Sai (also to whoever moved the string table, you got me, -2 minutes of my life).

Now let's talk about the Malignance change (or rather, non-change, as the tooltip merely got updated to convey its live functionality).

Malignance is currently being told to never trigger on damage that contains the BasicAttack tag. This is currently preventing the item from working with Warwick ult (who does actually have a serviceable AP build) and Viego ult (much less serviceable but will become useful for this discussion).

Both of these spells are tagged as both BasicAttack and ActiveSpell against their primary target, with Viego being simply ActiveSpell against his secondary targets. This means that both spells will normally apply all other spell effects to the target without issue. Malignance instead ignores them both purely for having the BasicAttack tag. However, in Viego's case, if you happen to have more than one target, you will be able to trigger Malignance, since secondary targets are not BasicAttack.

This appears to actually be an attempt to exclude specifically pet attacks such as Yorick's Maiden, Ivern's Daisy, and Annie's Tibbers. However even this is not very consistent, as Annie is able to trigger it anyways from the Tibbers aura, so the exclusion for him is irrelevant (if the concern was being ran down by pets spamming Malignance aoes, well he's already doing exactly that). Meanwhile Daisy is able to trigger it for her knockup attack, because that counts as ActiveSpell and not BasicAttack. Maiden is unable to trigger by any means.

Furthermore, Shaco ult's boxes are allowed to trigger, despite being pet attacks originating from his ult slot, purely because they are not tagged as BasicAttack.

Katarina ult is also allowed to trigger despite applying onhits, because it is not tagged as BasicAttack.

And now today, Riot has seemingly decided all of this is desirable behavior and has now written the bug into the tooltip.

Overall the entire thing seems misguided. If they want to ignore pets, then they could just check for the Pet tag instead, and add the tag to Tibbers aura and Daisy knockup. This would then also catch Shaco boxes. Or, they could accept that pets can already largely apply Malignance anyways, and drop the entire BasicAttack exclusion outright.

Currently Warwick and Viego (and more importantly, any possible future champions that might have a BasicAttack ult) are being excluded purely as collateral from an (unsuccessful) attempt to exclude pets. It's not good enough to simply just say "well it already works like this, no point in changing it so now I'm saying it was actually intentional the whole time to prevent Warwick from using the item".

Lastly, I don't actually give any fucks about AP Warwick, I just don't like that Riot often uses a mentality like this one to escape fixing trivial things because "well it's working as implemented" without actually bothering to consider whether that implementation is holistically desirable in the first place and whether better and simple alternatives readily exist, so I'm calling it out.

BasicAttack exclusion on Malignance comes from original testing without it where a number of cases were technically correct, but violated expectations. For example, should formswapper attacks in their alternate forms create Malignance pools? What about if they have damage attached to their ultimate swapping like Jayce R? Without the BasicAttack exclusion it's hard to intuit why Jayce R > AA can trigger Malignance but Elise can't trigger Malignance at all (or even decide whether Spiderlings should have the ultimate tag or not). The current version is the set of rules that generally aligned with people's expectations (though I agree there are some cases in the current ruleset that aren't the most intuitive - at some point I might revisit and see if there's not a better ruleset out there that matches player expectations closer than this one).

If it were designed to exclude pet attacks that's a whole separate tag that, as mentioned, could easily be excluded (and there's no intent to exc...

Zac Q tether range change is part of a larger set of tether changes, it's now an edge check rather than center check. This PBE deploy has a bug where the initial check on Zac Q is still center rather than edge but that will hopefully be fixed in the next deploy. (Also the tether changes are only partially on PBE, and subject to further changes).

edited for clarity

Etonet

Is Malignance only changed for Eclipse or for other procs like electrocute as well?

Malignance's damage was originally not tagged properly (didn't have the "proc" tag) which is what caused it to count for Eclipse. The tag is fixed in this patch, meaning anything that disregards proc damage will no longer register Malignance damage as a contributor.

It does, but as with all crit damage modifiers on Shadowflame, it only applies to the bonus damage from the crit, not the original damage.

So if you deal 100 magic damage and it's amped 20% by Shadowflame to 120, Randuin's doesn't decrease the entire 120 magic damage, just the 20 bonus being added by Shadowflame. In this case Randuin's would reduce the damage to 114.

This is a bug we're aware of, it is purely visual however - the gameplay works, but the visuals on the healthbar don't always properly represent the status of the shield. We'll hopefully have a solution for this soon regardless.

KelvinSouz

is it fixed

probably 14.2

me fix

TropoMJ

First of all, thank you so much for making this video - I've not gone through Phreak's yet but I've just finished yours and it was really fascinating. This sort of communication is super niche (as you said in the video, you have to be super-invested to find yourself watching it), but it's really rewarding. I found myself reading the patch notes being a bit sad at how little context there was on why the item system was changed the way it was (even the dev blogs left a lot of detail that you covered out), so getting to see such expansive thoughts is great.

In general, if this is content you'd be able to make, it would be amazing to get discussion of I guess game design philosophy as it currently is at Riot. Stuff like current thoughts on how various classes are and should be interacting with various systems. One thing which came up a lot in the run down is the idea that mages should be less threatening against tanks than they were in 2023, and the item changes reflect that goal. But what I'd love to know is the why of that, and also what a world where mages are less threatening to tanks should look like. Are we hoping to get to a spot where mages and assassins are mostly tasked with being anti-carries, while the ADC is hopefully left alone to shred the tanks? Is the intention that a burst or control mage faced with tanks should just give up on the idea of touching them and build to target solely enemy squishies?

I would also be really curious to hear your thoughts on how the playerbase is expected to perceive certain major changes. So for example, mages gaining AP in exchange for losing utility stats is well-explained in your rundown, but it obviously leads to a world where a substantial amount of champions are doing and taking more damage. The community naturally notices that mages are bursting super hard, and don't register the slower rotations or the fact that a newly bursty mage is themselves much more fragile. How do you guys prepare for this kind of community reception when you make a change like this, and if the community ends up coming to the consensus that mage damage is unpleasantly high, what options do you have for addressing that, beyond just replacing damage with haste and defensive stats again?

This is probably even less up your street but I would also be curious to see more of a deep dive into the philosophy behind particular items and changes. Shared support system changes were particularly interesting to me - the starter item losing all of its offensive stats during the laning phase probably pushes the laning phase to be a bit more friendly to passive enchanters and tanks at the expense of mages, aggressive enchanters and AD supports, as well as making ADCs a bigger part of the lane's damage output. Was any of that a design goal of the change or just a side effect? I would be even more interested to hear about the Wardstone changes. Previously, the item's stat passive was clearly designed to be useful to every type of champion who could possibly find their way into the support role. It's now been reworked to give purely defensive stats (+ haste), meaning there's a significantly higher trade-off for non-tank supports to build it than previously, while tanks are as comfortable building it as ever. I know that Wardstone is a niche item because it comes so late in builds that supports often don't get to buy it, but is there a reason that we moved away from it feeling good on every class in the role to being specifically friendly to only one of its classes?

These are probably all terrible ideas for things to cover but they were just the things which came to mind after watching your rundown!

Thanks for the thoughts - (maybe) helpful quick answers to these in case I never get around to another video:

General thoughts on how we structure classes - a lot of this comes down to power budgeting classes as a whole and deciding what to trade off when looking to shift a class strength or weakness to a different spot. Using a (somewhat incomplete, but hopefully illustrative) example here with mages, compared to other classes, mages generally have the most AoE and high teamfight impact as strengths, with immobility and meaningful resource costs as weaknesses. By making them less target-agnostic by removing some of their anti-tank outputs, we then generate room to add more AP which is the most satisfying stat we can give mages and this has the side effect of raising the variance of the mage class (since they are now sharper, dealing and taking more damage overall due to the loss of HP + haste and higher AP) which is generally a positive in this case considering that they were lower...

Wemnix

THANK YOU FOR THE AMP TOMES, ABILITY POWER USERS EVERYWHERE THANK YOU

no problemo